Understanding the Format Paragraph box in Publisher

If you'd like to customize the alignment, indentation, line spacing, tab stop positions and leaders, and line and paragraph breaks within selected paragraphs, you can use the Format Paragraph dialog box in Publisher.

Indents and Spacing

The Indents and Spacing tab allows you to customize the alignment, indentation, and line spacing of the selected paragraphs.

General

Here you can set the alignment for the paragraphs:

Left The leftmost character of each line is aligned to the left margin, and the right edge of each line is ragged. This is the default alignment for paragraphs with left-to-right text direction.

Center The center of each line of text is aligned to the midpoint of the right and left text box margins, and the left and right edges of each line are ragged.

Right The rightmost character of each line is aligned to the right margin, and the left edge of each line is ragged. This is the default alignment for paragraphs with right-to-left text direction.

Justified The first and last characters of each line (except the last) are aligned to the left and right margins, and lines are filled by adding or subtracting space between and within words. The last line of the paragraph is aligned to the left margin if text direction is left-to-right, or to the right margin if text direction is right-to-left.

Distributed This is the same as the Justified alignment except that lines are filled by adding or subtracting the same amount from each character instead of between and within words.

Distribute All Lines This is the same as the Distributed alignment except the last line of the paragraph will also be aligned to both the left and right margins.

Indentation

Indentation determines the distance of the paragraph from either the left or right margins of the text box. Within the margins, you can increase or decrease the indentation for a paragraph or group of paragraphs. You can also create a negative indent (also known as an outdent), which pulls the paragraph out toward the left margin if the text direction is set to left-to-right, or toward the right margin if text direction is set to right-to-left.

Preset This option offers you five preset indentation options and allows you to create a customized indentation.

Original This option uses the alignment options currently set in the Alignment section.

Flush Left This option uses the Left alignment.

1st Line Indent This option gives the first line of the paragraph a .25” indent.

Hanging Indent This option gives the first line a -.25” outdent and the remaining lines in the paragraph a .25” indent.

Quotation This option sets both the left and right indents to .5”.

Custom If you make changes to any of the presets they become Custom indentation.

Line spacing

Line spacing determines the amount of vertical space between lines of text in a paragraph. By default, lines are spaced at 1.19, meaning that the spacing accommodates the largest font in that line, plus a small amount of extra space. Paragraph spacing determines the amount of space above or below a paragraph. When you press ENTER to start a new paragraph, the spacing is carried over to the next paragraph, but you can change the settings for each paragraph.

Tabs

With tab stops, you can line up text to the left, right, center, or to a decimal character. You can also automatically insert special characters before a tab, such as dashes, dots, or lines. You can create different tab stops for all the text boxes in a publication. When you insert a tab stop inside a text box in Publisher, the tab stop marker appears on the ruler at the top of the workspace.

Default tab stops

In this box you can set the default for whenever you press the Tab key. The default is .5”.

Tab stop position

In this box you can specify tab stops beyond the defaults.

For each tab stop you'd like to insert, under Tab stop position, type the position, for example .2, to set the tab stop at .2 inches, and then click Set.

Under Alignment and Leader, select the options that you want, and then click OK.

Alignment

This allows you to set the type of tab stop you want to create.

Left This sets the start position at the left of text. As you type, the text moves to the right.

Center This sets the position at the middle of the text. The text centers on this position as you type.

Right This sets the right end of the text. As you type, the text moves to the left.

Decimal A decimal tab stop aligns numbers around a decimal point. Independent of the number of digits, the decimal point remains in the same position. (You can align numbers around a decimal character only. You can't use the decimal tab to align numbers around a different character, such as a hyphen or ampersand symbol.)

Leader

Leaders are dots, dashes, lines, or bullets that appear when you press Tab, for example following the chapter or section titles in a table of contents and that line up those titles with page numbers.